


Stay The Night

by SleepyCreep



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Drabble, Feels, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, I felt like doing one of these so I put my iPod on shuffle and here we are, Like I said it's just a lot of feels, M/M, Not really angst though, One Shot, Songfic, so many feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-19
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-27 01:21:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5028220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepyCreep/pseuds/SleepyCreep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Songfic based on Stay The Night by Green Day</p><p>"Gerard had come to the conclusion that love was only the second most powerful force on the planet. The first of course had to be fate; because it was not love that had brought Frank back into his life, nor he into Frank’s."</p><p>Frank and Gerard hadn't seen each other in over two years. Each would have said that they were fine, that there was no need to worry and that their lives were perfectly on track. Both would have been lying through their teeth.<br/>Life is made up of a mixture of decisions and chance events. Sometimes, decisions are necessary to heal the effects of random mistakes.</p><p>But, at other times, chance is what it takes to heal the effects of a bad decision.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stay The Night

**Author's Note:**

> Hey everyone! This was a kind of little side project to keep me sharp and as sane as can be expected from someone who is decidedly not sane to begin with. I hope you enjoy it, let me know what you make of it <3

“ _I got to know if you’re the one that got away, even though it was never meant to be._ ”

The walls were grimy, the fluorescent lighting was sallow and meagre, and Gerard’s head was already hurting, not least from the loud, deep music pounding over the sound system- the kind so loud you could feel it throbbing in your chest and feet. Gerard knew that if he ever made it outside, his ears would be ringing for the next hour at least. He could dimly make out the exit across the room from where he was, and with every passing minute it was looking all the more tempting. He hadn’t wanted to come at all; he’d had ambitious plans to spend that evening cooped up in his shitty apartment, on his couch with a six-pack of beer, watching re-runs of something, anything that required no brain-power whatsoever. It was only because he’d received a phone call with his mates Ray and Bob on the other end of the line, cheerfully asking him to come out to join them in some club in the city that they knew about, that he had come out here at all, and it was what had stopped him leaving so far. He knew they were just trying to get him to have a little fun, and it was not Gerard’s wish to disappoint either of them, but he just wasn’t feeling it today, the same as most days if he was honest, and all he wanted was to finish his drink, get up and go back home.

He stood up to scan for where the other guys might have gone, so that he could inform them he was leaving. In a dubious looking joint like this, he didn’t want Ray and Bob to end up worriedly searching backstreets in the area, expecting to find his bloodied, beaten up, possibly dead self. He couldn’t locate either of them immediately, but what he did spot that made his brain stop ticking was a chair in the shadowed corner of the club. He completely froze, heart suddenly beating much too hard.

Okay, so in truth it was not the chair itself that stopped him in his tracks, but rather the figure sat hunched in said chair, chin resting glumly on hands. He recognised the tattoos adorning those hands; he knew what they felt like. He recognised the darkened face partially obscured by them. He knew what that face looked like when it was lit up with a brilliant smile, and not left slumped in a frown. There had to be hundreds of scuzzy little underground clubs tucked away in every nook of this city, round every corner and down each alley, so how Gerard had blundered his way into the only one that had Frank Iero in it, he would never, ever know.

Gerard was left to come to the conclusion that love was only the second most powerful force on the planet. The first of course had to be fate; because it was not love that had brought Frank back into his life, nor he into Frank’s; it was pure and unadulterated chance. This very incident would never have happened if their involvement together had been left to love alone, as each of them had proved in the months following their breakup. The phone had always been that little bit too heavy to pick up and call, their respective houses always slightly too far away. And thus time had distanced them, guilt had silenced them, and neither Gerard nor Frank had ever attempted to heal things over between the two of them since.

Chance has no bias, Gerard realised; it can’t remember the dark, passionate nights full of tender intimacy, and days of bright, heart-warming companionship. Nor can it remember the petty squabbles and arguments, and the most unsatisfactory end to a relationship imaginable. Chance has no concept of fearing it too late to salvage dying embers, no idea of regret that one didn’t fight harder to keep the fire alight in the first place. If not for chance, this pair of cowards would have lived out their days separated; perhaps not happily, but willingly all the same. Of course, Gerard could theoretically get the hell out of this shithole right now and Frank would be none the wiser- he still hadn’t looked up from the bottle in front of him on the table after all- but somewhere inside Gerard knew he couldn’t do that, not when fate had, for reasons unknown, presented him with this opportunity to say something. Maybe it would worsen matters, but Gerard didn’t care for once. He needed this for his own peace of mind, if nothing else, however selfish that may seem. Made bolder by the alcohol buzzing in his system, Gerard began to negotiate his way through the thronging clubbers, in the opposite direction to the exit, before he could change his mind.

As he neared the table in the corner, Gerard could see that Frank, for want of a better word, looked haunted. The guy seemed listless; the same combination of booze and sleep-deprivation that met Gerard in the mirror on a daily basis. Only when Gerard was close enough to reach the table did Frank become aware of his presence and raise his tired hazel eyes to Gerard’s with a start.  
“Gee?” He croaked, “Wh-what are you doing here?” His voice sounded kinda raspy, Gerard guessed Frank was a little more drunk than himself, but nonetheless his voice brought several memories rushing back; some happy, some painful, others a mixture of the two.  
“I don’t know.” Gerard admitted. “Some friends dragged me out here. I don’t even know this place, actually.” If Gerard had been thinking rationally, the fact that his friends were still missing would have bothered him some, but it didn’t in the slightest, because he was wholly preoccupied. His palms were a little sweaty and his heart was thumping for all it was worth. Neither of them really knew what to say.  
“Why’re you here?” Gerard asked eventually. Frank shrugged in response as he lifted a bottle to his lips. He said nothing, but the _why the fuck not_ was implied. Gerard knew exactly what he meant.

In truth he had to admit to himself that ever since he and Frank had split up, over two years ago, he had found nothing and no one meaningful to dedicate his time and energy to. From what he could gather, the story was pretty similar on Frank’s end.

They stayed like that for several intense moments, two metres of smoky, sweaty air and two years of unresolved feelings hanging pendulously between them. Gerard began to wonder if this was a mistake, if Frank would just like him to get out of his sight, when the shorter man tentatively indicated the chair opposite him with an ink-adorned hand. “Would you like to… sit down for a bit…?” He asked quietly, with equal amounts of apprehension and hope filling his large, dark-lashed and heart-breakingly familiar eyes.  
Just like that, Gerard’s chance to bolt for the exit dissipated, but at the same time as he took a seat, a chance to do something right for once was appearing before him, if he only knew what to say.  
But, he realised, what was there to say? There was no point asking how each other had been. In both cases the answer would have been “Absolutely shit, I’ve lost all direction and motivation, my friends are worried about me and I’m not really coping but thanks for asking all the same, how about yourself?” So neither of them said that. There was no point in saying they were sorry, that it’d been a bad time and they’d made the wrong decision, and that they’d loved each other all along but never had the courage to say so. Whilst true, painfully so, the time for that would have been two weeks after they’d split, not two years. So neither of them said that. There really was nothing meaningful to say, so neither of them said anything. They simply sat opposite each other, reading each other’s’ minds in their faces, the way they’d always somehow been able to do. They looked at the lines that had appeared, the lights that had gone, and exchanged more without speaking as the music boomed behind them than they’d ever be able to put adequately into words.

Gerard spoke first.  
“This club is shitty.” He announced rather obviously.  
Frank nodded before draining the contents of his bottle. “Their beer tastes like ass. And mine’s not even cold anymore.”  
Figuring that was their cue to leave, they both stood up at the same time, chairs grating on the floor and ended up standing face to face.

“Oh.”  
“Do you want to g-”  
“Yes. No- wait, uhhh, what are you ask-”  
“Sorry, I didn’t-”  
“We should-”  
“I think-”  
“Just come here."

And suddenly they were kissing, so suddenly that neither had time to think about it, Gerard pushed Frank’s smaller frame against the nightclub wall and they both projected two years’ worth of passion into one long hot, desperate kiss.  
When they broke apart, they were panting and choked up with the overwhelming combination of buried memories, swirling emotions and burning need. Neither of them had felt much in the whole time they were separated, numb to the world and their own feelings, but neither of them had felt anything like _this_ in the whole time they had been alive.

“Gee,” Frank husked, “I’m so sorry, I just… I want you to know it wasn’t meant to end up like this. Everything just got in the way…”  
“I know Frankie,” Gerard replied softly, “I’m sorry too. It was so hard, y’know? I don’t know what happened but I couldn’t say anything and I thought it was too late and I guess we let ourselves down.”  
“All this time… do you honestly think it’ll work? You and me, after all this time?”  
Gerard thought for a moment. The truth was, he didn’t know. What happened here tonight, they could be opening Pandora’s Box, but at the same time he found that he didn’t really care.  
“All I really know,” he admitted, “is that I can’t go back to how I was. No way; I need you Frankie. I never said it in as many words, but I do. I was broken without you, and I just find it hard to believe that things could get any worse if we give it a try. Did you like it when I kissed you then? Did it feel right?”  
“What? Um, well I kissed you back, didn’t I? So I guess-”  
“Come home with me Frankie.” Gerard surprised Frank and himself by blurting the question.  
“Home?” Frank repeated ponderously. The word had other implications, about them and what was going to happen in the future. _Their_ future. Gerard was being serious.  
“Yeah, home. With me, tonight. If this turns out to be the biggest fuck-up in the history of fuck-ups, then that’s okay and we’ll deal with it when it goes wrong. But I can’t lose you again, Frank. You know as well as I do that we can’t just leave it here.”

Frank had to agree, and that’s how they ended up pushing their way back through the pulsating dancers towards the exit, driven by the liquid electricity that had jolted them both awake the second they kissed, and the hope of breathing life into something they thought had died. They had found their motivation now, they had a direction and although the path ahead could have its bumps, they were going to weather it together this time.

Gerard started the engine of his car with a glance across at the man he loved, the man he had always loved. Bob and Ray be damned, he’d call them tomorrow morning. As for himself and Frank, well, fate had given them a second chance, and neither planned to let go without a fight. For the time being, Frank was just going to stay the night, and they’d take it from there one day at a time.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, here are the lyrics to the song:
> 
> "Well I ain't got much time so I'll get to the point  
> Do you wanna share a ride and get the fuck out of this joint?  
> I've got an impulse so repulsive that it burns  
> I wanna break your heart until it makes your stomach turn
> 
> I got to know if you're the one that got away  
> Even though it was never meant to be
> 
> Say you'll stay the night  
> 'Cause we're running out of time  
> So stay the night  
> I don't wanna say goodbye  
> Say you'll stay the night  
> 'Cause we're running out of time  
> So stay the night  
> Well I don't wanna say goodbye
> 
> Well you're so sick and tired of feeling so alone  
> Well I don't understand the point if you have to go home  
> So won't you stay and count the circles 'round my eyes?  
> And we can watch the stars until the sun begins to rise
> 
> I got to know if you're the one that got away  
> Even though it was never meant to be
> 
> Say you'll stay the night  
> 'Cause we're running out of time  
> So stay the night  
> I don't wanna say goodbye  
> Say you'll stay the night  
> 'Cause we're running out of time  
> So stay the night  
> I don't wanna say goodbye
> 
> I gotta know if you're the one that got away  
> Even though it was never meant to be
> 
> Say you'll stay the night  
> 'Cause we're running out of time  
> So stay the night  
> I don't wanna say goodbye  
> Say you'll stay the night  
> 'Cause we're running out of time  
> So stay the night  
> I don't wanna say goodbye."


End file.
